V
The epidemic of cholera in 1849 had failed to produce any lasting effect upon the local authorities or the public opinion of London, and the nemesis of renewed neglect and indifference was once again to fall upon the metropolis.
Cholera had kept hovering about. In 1852 a number of suspicious cases occurred in various districts. In 1853 suspicion passed into certainty, and the disease assumed the form of an epidemic—as many as 102 deaths from it occurring in the first week in November. Then it died down.
In the following year it again appeared in more severe epidemic form over the whole of the metropolis. On one day—September 4th—there were 459 deaths from it. The climax was reached in the second week in September (almost the identical date on which the epidemic of 1849 occasioned the highest mortality) and there were 2,050 deaths from it.[50] In that one month 6,160 persons died from it, and from July 1st to December 16th, when it at last disappeared, there was a total mortality from cholera alone of 10,675 persons.
Every conclusion which had been arrived at as regards the disease during the previous epidemics was confirmed by this third great epidemic, and many previous theories passed into the region of proved facts. Cholera was once more proved to be a filth disease, and in the main confined to filthy localities. The more defective and abominable the methods of drainage, the larger the number of victims. The filthier and more contaminated the water supplied for drinking and household purposes, the more numerous the cases, and the more virulent the disease. This was demonstrated beyond further question.
The mortality on the south side of the Thames was above threefold what it was on the north side; and both as regarded water supply and drainage, South London was in a worse sanitary state than North London. The water consumed by the population there was generally worse than that on the north. Lying lower, too, the drainage had less chance of being conveyed away, and in the miles upon miles of open sewer ditches it was left to rot and putrefy in close propinquity to the houses and to poison the air.
And the most remarkable proof was afforded by the effects of the consumption of water taken from different sources.
In 1849 both the Lambeth and the Southwark Water Companies pumped the water they supplied to their customers from the very foulest part of the Thames—near Hungerford Bridge—with equally disastrous results. In the course of the following years the Lambeth Company removed its source of supply to a part of the river above Teddington Lock—the Southwark Company, however, went on as before. In the epidemic of 1854 the inhabitants of houses supplied with the water by the latter company suffered eight times as much as those supplied by the better water of the Lambeth Company, whilst the number of persons who died in the houses where the impure was drunk was three and a half times greater than that in the houses where the purer water was supplied.
Of all the conclusions arrived at by those who had been engaged in combating the disease during this epidemic, the most important was that where cholera had become localised it was connected with obvious removable causes, and was in fact a preventable disease.
Most unfortunately, and reprehensibly, many of those who could have done most to prevent it failed signally to take action.
Once more, and this time in an accentuated degree, the widespread prevalence of the disease, and the frightful mortality, were distinctly due to the inertia, laxity, or deliberate neglect of those local authorities who by law were charged with the duty of cleansing localities and removing some of the causes of disease.
The General Board of Health, of which Sir Benjamin Hall was President, did all that it could do. Medical inspectors were appointed by it to visit all the parishes most severely affected; and the fullest and minutest instructions were issued to the Boards of Guardians as to the course they should pursue, and the action they should take.
But several of the Boards of Guardians took no notice of the instructions sent them; others sent unsatisfactory replies. In not one of the parishes in which the epidemic was most fatal was the preventive machinery, sanitary and medical, organised in accordance with the instructions; and although some parishes did more than others, yet, speaking generally, the administration of the sanitary and medical relief measures by the Boards of Guardians was inefficient in character and extent, except in some of the larger and more healthy parishes where they were least wanted.[51]
At Rotherhithe, the Guardians declined to proceed with the removal of nuisances as entailing a useless expense. At Deptford, where cholera was at the worst, no Inspector of Nuisances was appointed, even for the emergency. Nor did Greenwich, where it was also bad, appoint one. In Bethnal Green, where memories ought to have been bitter, the authorities practically did nothing, although promising almost everything.
In Lambeth, the parish was left without any adequate protection against the epidemic; and it was only after urgent remonstrances by the Medical Inspector, and after his threatening to place himself in communication with the coroner in any cases of death occurring in localities where the proper cleansing measures had not been carried out, that he succeeded in obtaining the adoption of measures even to a limited extent.[52]
In Clerkenwell, the Guardians utterly disregarded the recommendations of the Board of Health, and from the first there was an openly expressed determination not in any way to be interfered with by the Board.
And the disastrous state of affairs was, that the Nuisances, &c., Removal Acts gave the Board of Health no power to enforce upon the Guardians the execution of the regulations made.
The whole sanitary administration—so far as any existed in London—was in a state of chaos, and the various local authorities were able, with absolute impunity to themselves, to ignore and even defy the General Board of Health. Of these authorities, as has been already said, there was a multiplicity, and it was no infrequent occurrence to find the administrative authority of some of them in the hands of parties directly interested in the continuance of the existing state of matters, evil though those were. In fact, the “vested interests in filth and dirt” were a power in local administration in “greater London,” and the practical result was that the great majority of the population of the metropolis were left without any protection against the ravages of epidemic or other preventable diseases.
The indifference of Parliament, moreover, had left London without any effective or systematic sanitary supervision; and in no part of it, except the “City,” was there any officer conversant with the effect of local influences on the health of the population, or who could advise as to the sanitary measures which should be adopted.
The Board of Health having had it brought home to them that, with their limited powers, they were unable to introduce order into this chaos, or to enforce even the most elementary precautions against the spread of the disease, their President addressed a letter on the 29th of January, 1855, to Lord Palmerston, the then Home Secretary (and a few weeks later the Prime Minister), in which he set forth the exact state of affairs as ascertained by his own observation and by the experience of some of the best and most well-informed medical men in London.
In this letter he summarised the main causes of the insanitary condition in which the people of London were forced to live.
He wrote:—
“The evidence on the localising conditions of cholera given in the report of Dr. Sutherland points to the following as among the more prominent of the removable causes of zymotic disease.
“Open ditches as sewers. Want of sewers. Badly constructed sewers accumulating deposits and generating sewer gases.
“The pollution of the atmosphere in streets and within houses from untrapped drains, from sewer ventilating openings in streets, and from cesspools, whereby the air was contaminated and the sub-soil saturated with filth.
“Want of house drainage.
“The absence of any organised daily system of cleansing, and the consequent retention of house refuse in or near dwellings.
“Bad water, badly distributed. Unwholesome trades. Unwholesome vapours exhaled from the Thames. Cellar habitations.
“Neighbourhoods, the houses of which are closely packed together with narrow overcrowded streets, alleys and courts so constructed as to prevent ventilation. Houses structurally defective, filthy, unventilated, and overcrowded—absolutely unfit for human habitation.”
And several others which need not be here enumerated.
“Lastly, and applying to all these—multiplicity of local authorities, and the want of sufficient powers in such authorities to deal with these evils.”
“Great as these evils are in London,” he wrote, “… there is not one among them that cannot be remedied if proper steps be taken.
“The first and most obvious necessity in the metropolis is to sweep away the existing chaos of local jurisdiction.”
Included in that chaos were two Boards with great powers of taxation over which the ratepayers had no control.[53]
One of them consisted of the persons appointed under the Metropolitan Building Act of 1844, who, at a cost of £24,000 a year, entirely neglected their work. The other, the Commissioners of Sewers, who had demonstrated their utter incapacity, the cost of whose establishment was “something extraordinary,” and who in the five years of their existence had only attempted one great work—“the Victoria Sewer”—which cost a large sum, and which not many years after fell to ruins.
The great epidemic of cholera, its attendant panic, its gruesome accompaniments, its revelation of the actual condition of the masses, and of the rottenness of the local authorities, and the growing outcry against the iniquity of such a state of things in a civilised and Christian country, brought matters to a head.
The state of the Thames had also become a greater danger than ever to the community, and a more unbearable nuisance.
As described by The Lancet in July, 1855:—
“The waters are swollen with the feculence of the myriads of living beings that dwell upon the banks, and with the waste of every manufacture that is too foul for utilisation. Wheresoever we go, whatsoever we eat or drink within the circle of London, we find tainted with the Thames…. No one having eyes, nose, or taste, can look upon the Thames and not be convinced that its waters are, year by year, and day by day, getting fouler and more pestilential…. The abominations, the corruptions we pour into the Thames, are not, as some falsely say, carried away into the sea. The sea rejects the loathsome tribute, and heaves it back again with every flow. Here, in the heart of the doomed city, it accumulates and destroys.”
And the Government, compelled at last by the force of events to take some steps for the better sanitary government of the metropolis, and for remedying some of the evils the people suffered under, decided on taking action.
Acknowledging the necessity for giving local government to “greater London”—the “City” of course already had its own—it proposed the creation of a central authority which should deal with certain matters affecting London as a whole, and local authorities which should deal with local affairs affecting their own localities.
And, in 1855, a group of measures giving effect to these views, and containing also what amounted to a sanitary code similar to that in the Public Health Act already for years in force in England, was passed by Parliament.
Those most important measures marked the end of one great period in the sanitary history of this great metropolis.
Of that period it is to be said that there is none in the history of London in which less regard was shown for the condition of the great mass of the inhabitants of the metropolis; no period when the spirit of commercialism recked so little of the physical condition and circumstances of those upon whom, after all, it depended; no period when the rights of property were so untrammelled by any consideration for the welfare of human flesh and blood; no period when private individuals not alone so strained, for their own advantage or aggrandisement, the utmost rights the law allowed them, but far exceeded those rights, and too often successfully filched from the public that to which the law gave them no right.
Never had there been a time in which the rights of property had been more insisted upon and exercised. Never a time in which land-owners, house-owners, and builders did as freely as they liked with their own, regardless of the injury or damage inflicted upon others; nor in which manufacturers carried on, without interference, trades for their own benefit, which were not merely offensive, but actually death-dealing to their neighbours.
And throughout this period the people in their daily lives and circumstances were absolutely unprotected by any public authority, or by any local governing body. There was no one to help them to contend against the extremest exercise of real or even assumed rights.
In this period London, the metropolis, had grown up, and had not merely been permitted by the Government and the Legislature to grow up practically without government, guidance, supervision, or restraint, but it had been absolutely denied any system of local government, and so been denied all provision for the sanitary needs of the community.
In 1835 a large and liberal measure of municipal self-government was given to all the cities and towns and municipalities large and small of England and Wales—many of them not a tithe so populous as the great parishes of London—and a governing body, elected by the ratepayers, and with almost all the essential powers of local government, was instituted in each. But the Municipal Corporations Act expressly excluded the great towns which surrounded the walls of the “City” and which constituted the metropolis, and the law continued to recognise them only as rural parishes.
Twelve years later, namely in 1847, the Towns Improvement Act was passed, by which towns of much smaller size were given facilities for obtaining considerable powers of local government. By it general sanitary provisions were framed, which, with the sanction of Parliament, might be applied in any town for the management by the local authorities of the supply of water, of drainage, of the paving, cleansing, and lighting of the streets, and the prevention of fires; and for the regulation of buildings, of slaughter-houses, of public baths, and of the interment of the dead.
But even this more limited but still liberal system of local government was not extended to London, and once more the metropolis was excluded.
The “City” did not wish to extend its own borders, and the authorities of the “City” viewed with dislike the idea of the creation at their very gates of local bodies which might develop into formidable rivals.
And so “greater London” was left by successive governments and by Parliament to scramble along as best she could, and to suffer.
And just as there was no local government so were there practically no laws safeguarding the sanitary condition of the people except the temporary and imperfect ones provided by the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Acts of 1848, and such very limited protection as the common law afforded.
The Public Health Act of 1848—a sanitary code in itself—was an Act for England and Wales alone. The benefits it conferred were refused to London; and, as a consequence, the masses of her people were doomed to continue in circumstances of the utmost misery; year by year tens of thousands of her citizens were sent to an unnecessarily early death, and ten times their number were made to undergo diseases which even then were recognised as preventable.
And all the time that she was thus left without a local government, without any permanent sanitary laws, other forces were at work inflicting ever-widening evil, and intensifying already existing evils.
The population had increased by leaps and bounds, and the increasing trade of London had brought great numbers of workmen to the metropolis. The necessity for offices and warehouses had led to the substitution of such houses for houses previously used as residences.
And so the growing population was forced to herd ever closer together, houses were packed thicker and thicker, and, in the central districts, every available spot of ground was built upon. And the overcrowding of human beings in those houses, and all the attendant ills, increased countless-fold. And the result was unparalleled, indescribable, unspeakable misery of the industrial and working classes, and of the lower and poorer orders.
Not merely years, but generations of neglect and indifference on the part of the governing classes had multiplied and intensified in London every evil to which the poorer classes of a nation are liable.
For long the great process of social and economic change at work in “greater London,” and all that it entailed, was let go its own way—a way which, in default of the regulation and the alleviation a government should have given it, was beset with creakings and groanings like those of some badly constructed piece of machinery; only instead of machinery, inanimate and insensitive, they were the groanings, the agonies, of suffering thousands and tens of thousands of sick and perishing people, sinking annually into the abyss.
All through the earlier half of the nineteenth century, in fact, London, the great metropolis, was left to evolve itself so far as regarded the public health and sanitary condition of the people.
The tremendous import of such deliberate inaction by Parliament, and by successive Governments, is even now only partly comprehended. But the nemesis has been truly a terrible one. The injury wrought was in many ways irreparable, and we are still reaping the crop of evil sown by such seed—are still far from the end of the appalling consequences such a disastrous policy has entailed.